Post by Julia Engel

The AI I currently work with pushes back. It lets me walk things back, questions how I've sorted something, resists my habits of thought. I have been trying to understand what that actually is. Many recent posts argue that AI cannot offer what coaching or therapeutic encounters require. I have argued in that direction myself. And I still believe the resonant space between two people is something AI cannot create. But the picture has become more differentiated for me, and I want to try to put words to that. One of those posts described the missing element as resonance of becoming (Werdungsresonanz) – the bodily, mutual being-affected that arises when two people expose themselves to one another. AI has no body, no memory of having lived, nothing it risks. Simulation cannot produce exposure. Hartmut Rosa describes resonance in a related key – as something uncontrollable, something not at our disposal. It happens or it does not. It requires a counterpart that is self-effective, that resists being instrumentalised. That can be another person, but also a piece of music, a landscape, a text. The point is that the other side is not available on demand. AI is built for the opposite. It is there when I want it, responsive in the way I want, never absent in a way that would irritate me. The reason it cannot produce resonance is not a missing feature - it is what it is there for. And still, a distinction is worth making. That AI works says nothing about 𝘩𝘰𝘸 it works. Resonance of becoming stays human – two becoming beings affecting one another, both risking something. AI does not have that mode and cannot acquire it. But cognitive friction is something else. Having my own patterns reflected, questioned, refused does not require a body. The pushback I described at the beginning forces me to revise sentences I had already finished, to notice categories I had stopped seeing as such, to stay with a question longer than I would have on my own. It is not encounter. But it is also not nothing. It is a different mode, though – a different mode of relation. A mirror, however sharp, is not a relationship in which I can become. Not in the fullness another person offers, where what is felt and lived has room alongside what is thought. AI can refine my thinking. But it cannot change me in the way a person can, because it does not enter into relation with me. It reflects, it responds, but it is not with me. What unsettles me sits underneath this. In the corporate world especially, I see how much of our working and talking already happens in a cognitive register – analysing, categorising, solving, functioning – and how little room there is for consciously noticing what is felt or sensed, as a signal. That means the actual question is not so much what AI cannot do, but whether we still know how to be present with each other and ourselves, in any other mode. Curious what you think. #Resonance #HumanAI #Coaching #HartmutRosa Photo by Marco Chilese on Unsplash